Month: August 2019

Enlarge / "We did not find Clotilda. I don't think Clotilda was ever lost to some," said Delgado. (credit: Emma Langdon Roche, publisher: New York: The Knickerbocker Press, 1914.)

The state of Alabama has filed an Admiralty claim for ownership of the wreckage of the last ship to smuggle enslaved people from Africa to the United States. Archaeologists identified the wreck in an arm of the Mobile River earlier this summer. The new claim could help provide some legal protection for the wreck, but the details of its future remain to be decided.

Burned and sunk in 20 feet of water

In 1860, the US had long since outlawed the import of slaves (but not the practice of slavery itself or the sale of enslaved people born on US soil). Wealthy Mobile landowner Timothy Meaher hired ship captain William Foster to smuggle 110 captives from West Africa into Alabama—mostly to make a profit, of course, but reportedly also partly just to prove that he could. In total, 109 men, women, and children survived the crossing in the hold of the schooner Clotilda.

After offloading his human cargo onto Meaher’s brother’s riverboat, Foster sailed up a bayou, where (according to his own handwritten account) he burned and sunk the Clotilda in 20 feet of water. It was the only way to destroy the evidence of his crime: the unmistakable stench of human waste that permeated the very wood of the ship. The 109 people who survived endured four years of slavery before the end of the Civil War, and they never returned home. Today, many of their descendants still live near Mobile.

Enlarge / This is a 10th-Gen Intel Core processor, code named Ice Lake. Ice Lake uses Intel's new 10nm process and offers more IPC (Instructions Per Clock) as well as greatly improved integrated graphics as compared to earlier models. (credit: Intel)

Yesterday, Intel launched its new 10nm Ice Lake mobility (read: notebook, ultraportable) processors. The launch consists of i3, i5, and i7 notebook parts, with TDP ranging from 9W to 28W, in considerably more separate SKUs than we're used to seeing in one generation.

This SKU list and specs for the new Ice Lake U-series and Y-series launch. (credit: Intel Corporation)

The first thing to understand about these parts is the difference between the U and Y series parts. U-series are standard mobile processors with TDP between 15-28W, and Y-series are low-voltage 9-12W TDP parts for ultraportable designs. The under 20W TDP niche that Ice Lake's Y-series fills was formerly occupied only by relatively sluggish dual-core parts, so seeing 4C/8T Core i7 parts like the i7-1060G7 with a TDP this low is a welcome change that should spell greatly improved battery life for thin-but-powerful designs such as Dell's XPS 13 or HP's Spectre x360 in the future.

Compared to 9th-generation Core mobile CPUs, Ice Lake features an 18% improvement in Instructions Per Clock cycle (IPC), but it offers a decrease in maximum clock rate. This means maximum performance is basically a wash, but we should expect substantial gains in battery life, assuming notebook manufacturers don't scale down battery capacities in response. TDP itself is also significantly improved: Coffee Lake mobile i5 CPUs were rated at 45W/35W, while the new Ice Lake U-series i5s and even i7s are down to 25W/15W.

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  The Google Play Pass Promo. [credit: Android Police ]

Google is testing a new "Play Pass" subscription service for the Google Play Store. The company confirmed testing of the new service to Android Police, after the site was sent screenshots of the subscription service by a user.

Screenshots show the service would have users sign up right inside the Play Store, allowing them to pay a monthly fee for access to "Hundreds of premium apps and games." The promo mentions "no purchases, no ads, and in-app purchases unlocked" for "a curated catalog spanning puzzle games to premium music apps and everything in between."

The purchase screen shows a $4.99 a month price with a 10-day free trial of the service. Developers will apparently get paid based on usage, as the screenshots mention Google will track "Play Pass app and game usage to determine how much developers earn."

Enlarge / An Apple Watch Nike+ Series 4. (credit: Getty Images | Wachiwit)

Apple workers have stopped listening to Siri queries worldwide, the company said this week. Apple plans to bring back human reviews of Siri voice recordings at some unspecified date, but the company said it will only review them when customers specifically opt in to the practice.

Separately, Google today confirmed that it recently "paused" human reviews of Google Assistant queries worldwide.

Apple's decision to stop having humans listen to Siri queries follows a report last week that contractors who review the recordings for accuracy heard private discussions and even sexual encounters.

Enlarge / Artist's conception of a customer virtually experiencing a world without GameStop. (credit: Ava Williams/NBC/NBCU Photo Bank via Getty Images)

Major game retailer GameStop has been having more than its fair share of struggles lately. After giving up on a search for a buyer in January, the company posted a massive loss of $674 million for the most recent fiscal year. As of today, GameStop stock is trading at less than 9% of its recent peak value in late 2015, and the continuing rise of digital game downloads and even game streaming isn't likely to help the company recover.

GameStop's COO and CFO departed the company after multi-decade tenures earlier this year. And the bad fortune continued yesterday as news broke that GameStop was laying off 50 of its "field leaders," including regional managers, HR staff, and loss prevention leaders. This move comes as part of a "Gamestop Reboot" program designed in part to rebuild stores as gathering places for esports and retro gaming fans.

For many consumers, the seemingly imminent demise of GameStop is not a cause for sadness. The company has a reputation in many corners for poor prices on trade-in games, high-pressure sales tactics for extraneous add-ons, unfriendly staffers, poor return policies, and, in recent years, stores filled with toys and Funko Pop figures instead of games. (RIP to GameStop subsidiary ThinkGeek, by the way.)